Yesterday, John Sweeney took to the pages of the NJ OpEd page to tell us what we already know — that the media isn’t doing an especially good job at getting political candidates to discuss in detail their approach to issues of concern to voters:
A common and legitimate complaint about the mainstream news media is that they are more interested in fluff and scandal than substance.
The horse-race aspect of elections is more exciting to them than a candidate’s ability to govern.
Sad, but true.
A preoccupation with polls, for instance, works against the interest of the voter. But keeping everyone’s eyes on the trivial also serves the interests of the politicians. They have a stake in a dumbed-down electorate. It helps them avoid committing themselves and it gives them an easy scapegoat, “the media.”
This admission is in the service of touting an effort that the NJ is working on to get the candidates to actually speak in detail about these issues, so they’ll be submitting a series of essays to do this. This may or may not work — but I wonder about an effort to get political candidates to speak to specific issues that isn’t specifically mediated by a third party to insist on the detail required.
Which gets to the heart of the matter. The horserace reportage is a function of a bunch of things — a reporter’s interest may be one, but the daily demands of having something to report on is the other. If you have to crank out something on a political campaign in the course of a day, the horserace is the easy thing to cover. A story on the state of the race may keep the story fresh for the reporter, (and may also be easier for their audiences too) but it is way easier than getting up to speed enough on policy and policy choices to avoid the shallowness of talking points reporting. An example from Sweeney’s own column:
The biggest expenditures are the entitlements: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
You see the problem here, right? A specific political narrative that the media repeats ad nauseum without checking on it or giving it any context. Sweeney isn’t alone in this, but I think that if you claim to deal in information, you’d be embarrassed by just repeating this BS. Social Security and Medicare are among the biggest entitlements, but they are the only ones with a funding steam directly from taxpayer paychecks. SS is fine for some years (2037 currently) and can be pretty easily fixed. And its most immediate problem is getting Congress to pay the IOUs. Medicare also has a direct funding stream, but is in more immediate trouble, even though it has a slightly longer lease on life due to the ACA. Medicaid does not have a direct funding stream and does have lots of trouble. But the narrative of entitlements are a problem persists even when the data clearly doesn’t support that entirely. And to the extent that they are a problem, SS and Medicare have solutions, but little political will for any of it. But notice that the label of unsustainability applies to entitlement programs, but not to a raft of expensive policy choices (for instance, a Defense Department that is expected to be the world’s policeman, or even to an entire government posture of transferring as many tax dollars as possible to businesses) largely favored by Republicans.
And then we have the snide presumption that liberals like big government:
As liberals and/or progressives, have you ever met a government program you didn’t like?
As if Mr. Sweeney never heard of Medicare Part D or the massive amounts of new spending from BushCo on education during the Bush years. Maybe he could ask the repub candidates if they would vote against farm subsidies or why they would advocate the *borrowing* of billions of dollars to provide tax cuts or even if they would advocate the repeal of Bush-era spending on Medicare and Education. That, of course, would mean that Mr. Sweeney himself get out of the horserace business that he notes political media is so mired in. If you are going to ask serious policy questions and ask for detailed solutions, you need to do that honestly — not from the media narratives derived from those in what Jay Rosen calls the Church of the Savvy. If you are going to ask questions that ask liberal candidates to defend an activist government, you need to ask conservative candidates to defend the kind of activist government they fight for — restrictions of personal liberty, borrowing money to give to businesses and rich people, insertions of Christianist policy to government and so on. In short, whoever asks these candidates for more detail is going to have to get beyond a GOP talking points view of the world, and get beyond a GOP talking points view of liberals, specifically.
Good on the NJ for trying to get to some policy detail, but I’m not hopeful for this effort if Mr. Sweeney’s fairly uninformed — and, frankly, biased — questions are any guide.